a “grey ultimate decrepitude,” yet visited by the spiritual fire which touches a soul whose robe of flesh is worn thin; not unassailed by doubts as to the justice of his final decision, but assured that his part is confidently to make the best use of the powers with which he has been entrusted; young of heart, if also old, in his rejoicing in goodness and his antipathy to evil.

The Ring and the Book is a great receptacle into which Browning poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers—­his searchings for truth, his passion, his casuistry, his feeling for beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of what was most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust rather than delicate.  Could the three monologues which tell how in various ways it strikes a Roman contemporary have been fused into a single dialogue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at length, we might still have got the whole of Browning’s mind.  But we must take things as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his own business best.  Never was Browning’s mastery in narrative displayed with such effect as in Caponsacchi’s account of the flight to Rome, which is not mere record, but record winged with lyrical enthusiasm.  Never was his tenderness so deep or poignant as in his realisation of the motherhood of Pompilia.  Never were the gropings of intellect and the intuitions of the spirit shown by him in their weakness and their strength with such a lucid subtlety as in the deliberations and decisions of the Pope.  The whole poem which he compares to a ring was the ring of a strong male finger; but the posy of the ring, and the comparison is again his own, tells how it was a gift hammered and filed during the years of smithcraft “in memoriam”; in memory and also with a hope.

The British Public, whom Browning addresses at the close of his poem, and who “liked him not” during so many years, now when he was not far from sixty went over to his side. The Ring and the Book almost immediately passed into a second edition.  The decade from 1869 onwards is called by Mrs Orr the fullest period in Browning’s life.  His social occupations and entertainments both in London and for a time as a visitor at country-houses became more numerous and absorbing, yet he had energy for work as well as for play.  During these ten years no fewer than nine new volumes of his poetry appeared.  None of them are London poems, and Italy is for the present almost forgotten; it is the scene of only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of 1876—­Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper; with other Poems.  The other pieces of the decade as regards their origin fall with a single exception into two groups; first those of ancient Greece, suggested by Browning’s